


Maybe the Street's Alight, Maybe the Trees are Gone

by apodiopsys



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-06
Updated: 2012-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-29 02:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apodiopsys/pseuds/apodiopsys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean wakes up six years old all over again and manages to get to Stanford for some help from his brother. Jess wants to drag Sam and his "nephew" to her parents house for Christmas. Unfortunately (fortunately?) there's more than enough space for him and he's along for the ride whether he likes it or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe the Street's Alight, Maybe the Trees are Gone

**Author's Note:**

> written for a prompt in hoodie_time at livejournal.

Dean stands by the side of the highway, arm outstretched and thumbs-upping at the sky. He’s going to get to California if it kills him, even if he has to hitchhike his way from Wisconsin. He’s found that there are _some_ advantages to looking like a six year old kid though, example number one being women are more likely to pick him up from the side of the road and drive him places than they would if her were, for instance, thirty three. He hikes the straps of his bag further up over his shoulders and huddles into his jacket, wishing for the millionth time that he were further south when the curse hit or that dad would maybe charge his cellphone for once or that his legs were long enough to drive.

Instead, he just walks further out by the side of the highway and waits for some middle aged woman with a soft heart to stop that car and give him a sad look and ask, _Honey, what are you doing out here by yourself?_ He can sometimes get about three counties, maybe four if he’s lucky, over by the time that he has to get out of the car. If he’s really lucky, the woman will open her purse and give him some money. It’s best when he has some money because then he can buy a bus ticket and a sandwich and not have to worry about someone calling social services or being a pedophile or whatever.

His jacket was not built for winter in the middle of Nebraska. By some huge stroke of luck his clothes seemed to shrink with him and now he looks like he’s in some biker wear designed for kids - like what he sees all those celebrities dressing their kids in. An ACDC t-shirt and a leather jacket were not built for holding out cold and snow. Dean sniffles, climbing up the steps of a bus and feeds the driver - a man in his late fifties, maybe - a story about going out Connecticut to meet his mom for Christmas. It’s a relief to find the whole of the back row empty and he drops his bag on one seat and stretches out across the others, planning on sleeping his way across state boarders while he has the chance.

It takes him five days and four nights - two slept in bus terminals, one in a men’s restroom at a gas station and one actually in a bus - before he even gets to California. It’s another twelve hours from the border to Stanford, and he’s tired and dizzy and feverish; his throat hurts and his nose is runny and, under normal circumstances, he’d shack up in an out-of-the-way motel room somewhere with pay-per-view porn and sit the sickness out. He can’t even do that because he’s like, six fucking years old and, trust him, he already tried to get a motel room. It didn’t work.

Even when he gets to the stupid university that Sam’s been attending for the past two years, it takes him another two hours to even find his apartment, no thanks to some guy he asked who seemed to think it’d be funny to send him in the opposite direction. It’s probably sometime between ten and midnight when he even finds it and he is just _so tired_. The lights are all off in the building that he really hopes is Sam’s and he doesn’t have the energy to have to explain it all to him when all he wants to do is sleep, so he finds an open window in the back of the building (God bless Sam’s weird things about sleeping with open windows because fresh air is good for the body and _“Hey, man, they do it in the Netherlands.”_ ) and shoves a trashcan under it so he can climb up and in.

The problem though, with physically being about six years old is that his legs really aren’t long enough to be climbing into windows with and even when he’s stretched all the way up on his tiptoes he isn’t quite tall enough to reach the window ledge which is ridiculously high up. He assumes that it’s a bathroom window which would explain why the only person who would be able to see out of it is Sam. Dean crouches and jumps, fingertips barely grabbing the icy ledge and pulling himself up so he’s half in and half out. The resulting clattering of a trashcan being knocked over has him grinding his teeth together because it’s loud and his head hurts and mostly it is really fucking _loud._

He’s crashed his way to the floor and shaking his head from left to right, trying to clear it when there’s a pair of bare legs in front of his face and a girl with long blond hair rubbing her eyes and saying sleepily, “Sam, did you forget your keys again? Why didn’t you just call me?”

All he can do is blink blearily up at her and try not to look like he shouldn’t be there. If he weren’t so _dizzy_ (the room hasn’t stopped spinning since he hit the floor) he’d maybe be impressed with her - with Sam’s girlfriend, or whatever she is - and maybe even try and hit on her. As it is, the best he can manage is, “ ‘M Dean, ‘m Sam’s brovver,” and “Need Sam,” or maybe it’s, “Need sleep,” and it most likely comes out, “Need Sleem,” because they sound so alike and he really, really needs both right now.

Then there’s cool hands on his forehead that are distinctly female and Dean opens his eyes - doesn’t remember closing them - to see a pretty face looking worriedly down at him. She’s making soft cooing noises at him and then she’s gone and the whimpering noise he can hear most definitely isn’t coming from him. She comes back with a blanket that is so soft and she’s wrapping him in it and lifting him up and Sam’s girl is way, _way_ stronger than she looks. He says, “Want Sammy,” into her shoulder and then the world goes blissfully black.

&

The first thing Dean is aware of as he comes slowly to are hands stroking his hair and a bed that definitely didn’t cost him seventy dollars. As he becomes more aware of things he realizes that whoever’s stroking his hair is humming too, a lullaby that tugs at something from the edges of his memory. Dean keeps his eyes closed and his breathing even as he thinks back and tries to figure out where he has and why he feels like he just got hit by a cement truck. When it does come back to him he groans because he’s a _kid_ and he doesn’t know how to undo this curse and he _really_ hates witches.

“Hey,” the female voice coos, and then she’s leaning over him and curly blond hair is tickling his cheeks. “Shhh, you’re okay.” Dean cracks his eyes slowly and thinks _Well ain’t you a sight for sore eyes_. He doesn’t say it though, instead licks his cracked lips and says in a pitiful voice that he’ll later deny ever having used, “Sammy?”

“Sam isn’t here right now,” Sam’s girlfriend says in a soft voice, smoothing the hair off of his forehead. Dean notices vaguely, like some out-of-body experience, that being hit by a cement truck aside and sniffles aside, he doesn’t feel that bad anymore. “But I’m Sam’s girlfriend, Jessica. He didn’t tell me his brother had a kid.” The girlfriend - Jessica frowns a little. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

He sniffles, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Dean’s clothes disappeared somewhere while he was out and he’s under a fluffy duvet in a t-shirt that’s so big it has to be Sam’s. He wishes that he were old enough to make a remark about his brother’s girlfriend undressing him while he was passed out. Being six is like being caged in. Instead he says, “‘M Dean.”

Jessica rolls her eyes, getting up off the bed. He hears her saying something like _...naming your kid after yourself, leaving him..._ as she leaves the room, but he’s too comfortable to care - of correct her. She comes back with a glass that’s filled with water, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to him. “You thirsty?” she asks, and Dean nods. He doesn’t even have to hold the cup himself; she tips it up to his mouth carefully, taking it back when he’s done. Dean drinks the whole glass and is still thirsty after.

There’s a TV in their bedroom and Dean thinks _who the hell has a TV in their bedroom?_. “Sam’ll be back around noon, he was having a study night with some friends.” He can almost see the quotation marks around study night, and wonders how hungover he’ll be when he decides to stumble in.

&

Six feet and four inches of a slightly (very) hungover Sam crawl through the door at about quarter past one. His voice is hoarse when he calls out, “Jess? Jess, I’m home!” His bag and coat land with a dull thud on the hallway floor and he walks through the kitchen and nabs a bottle of water out of the fridge on his way to the living room. He stops short when he sees his girlfriend sitting with some six year old kid under basically every blanket they own on the sofa. They’re playing on a Nintendo DS, and by the sound of it, Super Mario Bros. “Jess? Who is - what are you,” he starts to ask about eight different questions at the same time and settles for, “Is he wearing my shirt?”

“Your brother dropped him off yesterday,” she says dryly, and before Sam can say blankly, _my brother?_ she continues, “Didn’t even stop to say hey. I caught him falling through the bathroom window at about one in the morning and he had a fever. Kind of your brother, really.”

Dean looks up from the couch and gives Sam a look that his brother is so familiar with he does a double take. He closes his eyes and counts backwards from ten, reassured on opening them that, no, he is not still drunk. Sam sighs deeply.

“Jess? Could you make me something to eat while I ask my... nephew what’s going on with Dean? I haven’t eaten since last night.” His girlfriend nods and slides out from under the blankets, but not before touching Dean’s hair in a way that is so motherly Dean can’t help but sigh happily. She kisses Sam briefly on the lips on her way out.

Double checking to make sure Jess is out of earshot, Sam sits down next to Dean and gives him a look filled with exasperation that he’s perfected over the years. Dean calls it his bitch face. “What happened this time? Why are you a kid and why are you _here?_?” The last part comes out maybe a little harsher than he intends. Dean ignores it and Sam doesn’t mention it either.

“Witches in Wisconsin. They’re put a curse on me _and_ got away, then I wake up the next morning and I’m this. I don’t know how to undo it and Dad’s phone is out of service or dead or he’s having a long break with Jim, Jack and Jose. I hitchhiked my way here and got sick on the way.” He pauses, relieved that he can talk normally again and not like the six-year-old Jessica thinks he is. “Nice job on Jessica by the way.”

“Thanks,” Sam says, secretly more than a little pleased that this time _he’s_ the one to get the girl. “So what, you broke into my house at night?” The look on Dean’s face says, _well, yeah_ so plainly that he doesn’t even need to stop. “And now you expect me to get you all fixed up. Nice, Dean, I’m not your maid, it’s not my job to clean up your messes.” He pauses for a minute to drink basically the entire water bottle that he took from the fridge. “Lucky for you that I’m staying here for winter break. I’ll take you to Bobby’s or something.”

Jess comes in bearing a tray of sandwiches and juice just on time to hear the last part of Sam’s speech. “Sam! We’re not staying, I already told you. I’m taking you to my parents house for Christmas since you’re not spending it with yours.” She puts the tray down on the table and gives Dean a plate. “It’s PB&J. I cut the crusts off because my little brother didn’t like crusts when he was your age.” Sam looks at the plate that Jess gives him and pouts a little, smile teasing.

“What, no cut-off crusts for me?”

Jess laughs. “No, you can cut your own crusts, mister.”

They all eat their food in silence for a little while, Dean probably the most gleeful over his. “I can call my mom and tell her we’re bringing your nephew too,” she says finally, after watching Dean for the majority of the time they were eating. “She won’t mind, and since my brother’s in New York with his girlfriend’s family there’s extra space.”

&

Sam and Dean don’t get any say in the matter. Jess calls her mom after lunch and _of course Sam’s nephew can come along! The more the merrier! I’ll make extra cookies!_

They tell Jessica that Dean didn’t know where his dad was. Sam called around to see if there was anyone who knew a spell in order to reverse the curse that was put on Dean and apparently a friend of Bobby’s might just have the thing. Lucky for them Bobby’s friend lives in Montana too, a few hours drive away from where Jess’ parents live. They tell her that they’re going to see a friend of Dean’s who might know where Sam’s brother is.

It’s three days after Dean gets to Stanford that they all pile into Jessica’s car to drive to Illinois. Dean has Sam’s Nintendo DS and enough games to last him about three days and as it turns out, Jessica is _awesome_ because whenever she drives - which is more than half the time because her car is her _baby_ \- they listen to everything and anything that was recorded before 1979 and Dean thinks that if she wasn’t his little brothers girlfriend and if he wasn’t currently six years old, he’d marry her.

He spends half of the car ride sleeping the rest of whatever cold or flu it was that he got off, the other half spent playing video games. Dean comes to the conclusion that if things like Nintendo DS’s had existed back when he actually was six, travelling around while dad hunted wouldn’t have been so bad. He beats Super Mario Bros twice, plays Grand Theft Auto against Jessica’s wishes (“Sam, he’s too young to be playing GTA!” “Jess, he can handle it, he’s seen more than you think.”) and decides that the second he has access to a credit card again, he’s buying one for himself.

It takes them a day and a half to drive to Whitefish, where Bobby said his friend lived. Jess stays in the car with a book, and Sam promises, “Fifteen, twenty minutes max. We’ll be back in a few,” and shepherds Dean towards the door. He knocks and there’s a good two minutes until it’s opened by a gruff black man who looks at Dean and then looks at Sam and says through the screen door, “Well, I’m not buying anything.”

“No, it’s not that,” Sam says, resting his hands on Dean’s shoulders. “We’re friends of Bobby’s? This is Dean, he said you might have a spell that’ll reverse a de-aging curse.”

The guy looks down at Dean for a long time and then says finally, “Well, you might as well come in. I’m Rufus.” Sam turns around to wave at Jessica as he steps inside the cabin. “I can’t believe Bobby sent you to me,” he says, and then - “Figure’s it’d be something big like this.The man owes me.” He’s going through piles of books, stacks of papers until he finally finds what he’s looking for and pulls it out. Rufus rips a page out of a notebook and starts copying what he found onto it, saying while writing, “This should be what you need. Spell requires for it to be during a full moon though.”

“I told you it wouldn’t take longer than fifteen minutes,” Sam says back in the car. The copied spell is tucked safely in his inside jacket pocket and it’s his turn to drive. “He gave me Dean’s number so I called him, said that he’s in Wisconsin on a job.” It’s about three hours from Rufus’ to Jessica’s parents. “Since Christmas is in two days I said that we’d keep him until then and I’d bring Dean junior back to him by the twenty seventh-ish and be back to you by New Years.”

Jessica nods, closing her book and putting it in her bag. He doesn’t say so, but Dean thinks that it’s trippy thinking of himself as a dad and even if he was, he most definitely wouldn’t name his kid after himself. “Did he say why he’d even left him on our doorstep in the first place?”

“Uh, no,” Sam says, making a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. They hadn’t figured out a backstory for that so decided to leave it vague.

&

If Sam and Dean had ever gotten the chance to meet their grandparents, Dean really hopes that they would’ve been like Jessica’s parents. They treat him like he’s their grandkid and gush about Sam and Jess having kids one day and it occurs to Dean that he never even asked how long they’d been together, and that makes him feel guilty because he has no _clue_ about anything to do with Sam or the life he built at Stanford.

Her mom, Amy, tells Dean that he can call her grandma if he wants. He does want. “You’re going to sleep on the couch,” she says apologetically, after leaving a plate of cookies and a tall glass of milk in front of him. “Sam and Jessica are sleeping in her old room and we just turned her brother’s old room into an office.” If she keeps giving him cookies the way that she is, Dean doesn’t think he’ll mind sleeping on the couch too much.

They eat meatloaf for dinner and Jessica’s mom produces a cherry pie for dessert, and if Dean had wanted to marry Jess earlier, he wants to marry her mother now even more. Jessica’s dad is quieter than his wife, but he sits with Dean and shows him his hunting gear while Dean pretends not to know how to use a gun and wishes that he didn’t know the things he did. Later on, they crowd around the TV to watch A Christmas Carol and Dean gets to sit on Jess’ mothers lap. He doesn’t mean to, but he falls asleep there, warm and _safe_ , surrounded by the most normal family he’s ever been close to in his life.

Christmas dinner isn’t anything like he thought it would be. They sit around a mahogany table and hold hands while they say grace like they’re in a movie, and then there are mountains of mashed potatoes and sweet ham and bread and carrots and there is just _so much food_ that Dean doesn’t know what to do with himself. Everyone laughs - Sam, Jess, Jessica’s parents - at how he’s shovelling food down like the sun might not come up again, but Dean just ignores it and asks for more potatoes.

Even though Sam hasn’t said anything, he knows that they both wish they could’ve had Christmases like this when they were both kids, instead of take out boxes in cheap hotel rooms, exchanging gifts that were usually bought at gas-stations and wrapped in newspaper. It makes Dean’s heart ache with what he could have had.

Lying on the sofa underneath a duvet, head in mama Moore’s lap, he sleepily watches Sam and Jess sitting on the loveseat across from him. Dean sees Sam twine his fingers with Jessica’s and lean forward to whisper something in her ear that makes her laugh and he wishes that he could have something like that.

He’s _full_ and sleepy, after eating almost four helpings of everything at dinner and then there was pie and Jessica’s mom offered him warm chocolate chip cookies too. Dean is proud of Sam, proud of his baby brother for getting out, for the life that he built that is so normal his heart could burst. She rubs her fingers through Dean’s hair; he feels like a cat, making a noise that’s so close to purring that Jessica’s mother laughs.

When they leave, mama Moore gives Dean a bag of cookies that are still warm. He hugs her as tight as he can - it’s not very tight and his fingertips can’t even touch around her middle. She smells clean, like soap and perfume and pine and Dean wants to remember it because he knows that this is probably going to be his last chance at anything as remotely domestic as this. Jess let’s them take Sam’s car and promise to check in every night; he lets Dean sit in the front seat and he waves out of the window and then turns around through the back until the waving people aren’t even visible anymore.

Dean slumps down until he’s so low that he can’t even see over the windshield. They’re quiet for the first few hours of the drive, and then Sam is pulling into a McDonalds drive-thru and ordering his brother a giant milkshake and a coke and a large fries and a Big Mac and he doesn’t even have to complain about it making his car smell like fast food because they aren’t driving his baby. He eats it all in less than fifteen minutes and if you didn’t know better it’d look like he was starving, when really he ate four helpings of ham and potatoes and vegetables just twelve hours before.

It doesn’t take him long to figure out that the flat, square pieces of plastic are CDs and Dean says, “Why, cassetts are so much smaller,” before he picks out one and hands it to his little (big?) brother. Sam makes his bitch face but then he’s rolling his eyes and Dean knows that it’s the ghost of a smile on the corner of his lips when he feeds the disk to the player, Led Zeppelin crooning out of the sound system. Even with all the family feel good and safeness that’s been going around, Dean feels most at home on the road with Sam.

They’re quiet again after that, but that’s something that Dean appreciates about Sam. They don’t need to talk. It’s good like that. Dean mourns the childhood that he could have had; the one that Would Have Been if only mom hadn’t died, if only dad hadn’t gone a little off the rocker, if only he hadn’t started hunting. There are a lot of if only’s running through his head. Sam and him made a pact to drive as far as possible as fast as possible, and they’d just sleep in the car because it shouldn’t take more than two days to get to where he left the Impala in Wisconsin. Dean misses his baby.

It’s dark out when Sam pulls over, early enough that Dean throws him a quizzical look. His brother says, “Get out, I wanna show you something.” He pops the trunk and while Dean leans against the side of the car, burrowing into the jacket that Jess bought him - so much warmer than the one he showed up on their doorstep with. Dean thinks that it’s a gunshot when the first rocket goes off, shooting up into the sky and dispersing into red stars. Sam is kneeling next to a bunch of them, sparklers and rockets; fireworks to light up the sky. It isn’t New Years yet, and Dean deems himself mentally old enough to be able to go and stand next to where Sam is without people being worried of him burning himself.

Because Dean is physically six years old he deems it okay to wrap his arms around his brothers waist and hold him tight. His stomach is flat and hard, well-trained to a fault, but Dean rests his cheek against it and watches as colors explode across the night sky. He looks up and up and up, up at his impossibly tall brother who wants nothing more than to be normal and get the education and the job and the girl, and Dean vows that after this, once he’s back to being a (mostly) well functioning adult with responsibilities again, that this is Sam’s last time.

The boys sleep in the backseat of the car in that field, Dean in Sam’s lap with his head on his shoulder. There’s a blanket wrapped around the both of them, but Sam wakes up first and eases a still-sleeping Dean into a lying position so he can drive the rest of the way and let Dean sleep. It takes five more hours, but the twenty-six-year-old trapped in a six-year-old body sleeps the whole way and when he wakes up Sam’s already done a coffee and fast food run, and there’s burgers and milkshakes waiting for him. He rubs his eyes blearily.

“We’ve just gotta wait for tonight,” Sam says around a mouthful of burger. Dean nods, wishes that he could stay six for just a little while longer, maybe forever. It would be so _easy._ He can’t.

They preform the spell under a full moon, burning agrimony and celandine and three inch long broom straws, mixing it with a few drops of Dean’s blood. In all, it’s easier than he expected.

Changing back is different from the first time. He feels a little dizzy and then there’s a rush of wind and Dean is suddenly normal again, six foot one and twenty six years of man again. He inhales deeply, exhales, breath white on the air. “Thank you, Sammy,” he says, and then looks down at his hands and turns them up to look at the palms and back down to see the back of them. The brothers clear up the mess they made, the blanket, throwing away the ashes from the spell and stowing the bowl in Impala’s trunk.

Dean says, “I’ve missed you, Sammy,” before he can stop himself, before they part ways again. They’re standing outside of the Impala and the engine is purring, ready to go at a moments notice. Sam’s eyes catch his and he’ll admit, it’s nice being more or less at eye level with his brother again.

“Yeah,” he says, “Me too.” Dean does something unexpected by the both of them, pulls him in and hugs him close. They stand like that for a long moment, suspended in time by the caricature of the past week. Then they’re breaking apart and Dean is getting into the Impala like nothing even happened.

He rolls his window down. “Sammy? I’ll call you, so we can keep tabs.” Sam turns around from where he’s walking back to Jessica’s car, cellphone already in hand so he can call her and tell her that he’s on his way back.

“Absolutely,” he says, and then, “And, Dean? If you ever come back, do me a favor and try not to hit on my girlfriend.”


End file.
